


Like a Blasphemous Tidal Wave

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Humanstuck, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not the most responsible in their little group, but she's far from the least either. When Aradia wraps her car around a flagpole, everyone is left reeling, Sollux most of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Blasphemous Tidal Wave

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Humanstuck AU (Tumblr Text Post)](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/23537) by Tumblr User Latulapyrope. 



Given the people she hung around, no one really considered Aradia Megido the flightiest of broads. She got distracted every now and then, who didn’t, but compared to the otaku with the cat hat and the Pretty Pink Princess of the Swim Team, there were much more oblivious, much more energetic members of their little cohort.

Even her boyfriend with the mood swings was more likely to do something irrevocably dumb than her, and he was almost sensible. She wasn’t the voice of reason, so much as simply too grounded to get thrown hither and yon by high school stupidity.

She was even a good driver, which is a rare trait to come by at sixteen.

It was sunny, breezy, and clear as a bird’s whistle, they day she slammed into the courthouse flagpole, tire burst on a pothole and face burst on a faulty steering column.

The school memorial was two weeks later, on the day her friends came to class with bruisy eyes and slumped posture, still reeling from a funeral that should never have happened. 

Sollux didn’t go to class that day.

Sollux didn’t do an awful lot, after that.

In his lowest lows, he just sat in bed, refusing to so much as sit up, let alone get dressed and march to the bus, the bitching of his older brother ignored as easily as the sympathetic looks of his father.

But the highs were worse, because there was no flying-falling on top of the world rush that burst inspiration and activity from his seams, threatening to burn him alive in the lamplight of his own internal sun.

There was just _rage_ , impotent and self destructive, knuckles bloodied and toes dislocated, throat ragged with screaming and crying and longing.

He didn’t go to homecoming.

He didn’t go to the spring formal.

He was too young to go to Prom, without the accompaniment of a brown eyed junior with a ridiculous penchant for dirt and bones.

The next year was better, as the aching filtered down to a pale, cold lump in the back of his skull. Something he could ignore, and only poke at in the dark, when he wanted to hurt himself just to be sure there was still something in the world worth being upset over.

His friends took him back in easily enough, suctioning him into the two-person vacuum that had been left when Aradia died and he imploded.

Karkat dragged him out every few weeks to “stop rotting in the dark, you aren’t a fucking mold you jackass, you need actual, real sunlight!”

Feferi was always touching him, trying to remind him that there were still people who wanted him in the world. After a while she even stopped looking scared in the in between moments, like maybe they weren’t trying enough and he was going to sink down with his love-lost maiden.

Even Vriska and Eridan, still aggressive little fuckers who could find an excuse to yell at anyone about anything, only screamed at him as long as he bellowed back, instead of steamrolling over him regardless.

Leaves changed colors, frost fell in the mornings, and Homecoming wandered into the public consciousness, bringing with it Superlatives.

He didn’t bother voting, what was the point, honestly? Everyone knew who they would be anyway. Most likely to succeed would fall on the shoulders of mini-Crocker now that his freakishly obsessed sister with the death wish had graduated. Most Fit didn’t even bear commenting on, though the addition of a female column to voting sparked the barest hint of curiousity. Most likely to Fall Asleep In Public was the stupidest bullshit excuse for a superlative he could possibly imagine and it was clearly going to go to Karkat’s stoner pal anyway. If Eridan and Vriska didn’t win biggest flirts, he would eat his own glasses.

He stopped reading half way through, crumpling his ballot in the middle of homeroom and excusing himself to the toilets.

They dragged him to the dance. Of course they did, why wouldn’t they?

He’d been expecting it, but it still left him twitchy, leaning on the precipice of pissed.

Feferi and Karkat were looking fucking suspicious all night, fluttering around him nervously, talking too much. Which was an achievement, considering who they were. It seemed like it should have taken conscious effort, to out chatter themselves.

Then Sunglasses-At-Night took the mic, to read out the victors in his grating monotone and pseudo-witty-comeback style that had probably earned him something like “Self Proclaimed God” or “Most Talkative” or “Most likely to get punched in the jaw as soon as he steps foot into the real world.”

Feferi clung to Sollux's shoulder, chirping about each announcement, and jostling him to try to make him clap along. Karkat just stood there, glaring, but he did summon up the most beleaguered looking applause imaginable when Gamzee, surprise surprise, won an award for being terminally narcotic.

“And last of all, so clearly the best, we’ve got the dark horse special everyone’s been waiting on: Cutest Couple.” Sollux wondered idly if he could get away with rolling his eyes again, because this was unbelievably dumb and inexplicably exhausting. Or maybe just explicably exhausting: too much of Feferi and Karkat in one day could grate down the best of walls.

His name coming out of every speaker in the auditorium caught his attention, though. Made him flinch enough that Feferi looked guilty. Karkat just kept the same steady look of brow-drawn annoyance throughout “and Aradia Megido.”

He would never admit, not under pain of death, that the massive sums of cheap, sugar-rich punch he’d been drinking all night came frothing up out of his throat in a panic. There were levels of humiliation that even his self-loathing couldn’t quite tolerate.

This was one of them.

An entire school full of people, making a mockery of him, but much, much worse than that, using her name to do it. Throwing her death in the mud for the sake of a cheap shot.

He didn’t go back.

He just shut down.

No more impotent rage, no more anything. He was a rock, immobile and invulnerable, and he sure as shit never let himself think about her, or about all those people destroying her memory for no fucking reason.

His so-called friends came over, sometimes. Tried to explain. Tried to say it was supposed to be a memorial, supposed to be a kindness. Tried to erase the scuffs and shoe prints the student body had danced all over her grave.

Mituna graduated that spring. Sollux took up learn-away courses at home. His dad looked at him sometimes, when he was packing his overnight bags to fly another chain of international flights, with this quiet guilt that almost threatened to actually make him feel something other than disconnected apathy and deep, crushing exhaustion. It never quite managed.

His summer was an echoing cavern of too little distraction and too much sleep, which never did anything to make him less achey and tired.

Summer leaked into fall, and he suspected he should be proud that his dual obsessions with proving he was still a functional student, and sleeping enough to prove he definitely and most assuredly was _not_ meant that he would be graduating by Christmas.

Pride never came.

But the flashing lights and cheap, loud brakes of the bus started running every morning and afternoon, and they brought with them a stern looking girl charging viciously into his bedroom, breaking into a screaming diatribe that went on for so long it became background noise, right up until she slapped him, fingers splayed and curled so her long nails caught his cheek.

It hurt, star bursts of sharp pain fading into a throbbing heat, and he stared at her until her face made sense.

She was taller and leaner than he remembered, and her hair wasn't dyed bright blue. Her oversized olive-drab jacket and cargo pants were gone, replaced by stockings and a skirt with jangling chains dripping charms draped around it in a slapdash fashion that said “made at home” rather than “bought at hot topic.” He hardly recognized her at all.

“Sollux Catpurr you _look at me_ when I am talking to you, you s _purr_ ious bastard!” 

It was so _bizarre_. Nepeta had been a friend of a friend in every direction, but he wasn’t actually sure they had ever spoken to each other directly before. He found himself wracking his brain, trying to remember.

He thought he probably would have noticed the way her over drawn R’s rolled over his name, if they had.

She screeched a wordless, frustrated noise, and nearly went in to punch him. He could see the moment when she decided that his head-cocked confusion was just going to have to be good enough. When she threw her hand into her messenger bag with far more force than was warranted instead, and all but threw a cluster of eight-by-eleven worksheets at his chest, most of them fluttering off to one side or another.

“You’re the meanest, most awful purrson I have efur heard off, mister Catpurr and you hurt efurryone I love and I ought to beat you with a scratching post until you’re red and blue all over like your dumb, dumb glasses that efurryone hates. I _hate_ you! I hate you so much and you don’t even care beclaws you’re so sad that it’s not even _real_ anymore, and you’re ruining efurrything she efur did fur you, you awful, spiteful mean little _dick_!”

And then this girl that he had exchanged, in the most generous of estimates, maybe fifteen minutes of conversation with in his entire life was flinging herself at him, breaking down in heaving, gross sobs, crunching all the papers she covered his lap in as she screeched directly into his chest, no sense of personal space whatsoever.

It was just so far outside of anything he had context for that he sat there and let it happen. It wasn’t like she weighed that much anyway, but the tinkling chain all over her hips was digging into his side sharply.

It didn’t bother him like it should.

“You’re coming with me, you’re coming out right now, put on some real pants and come on, we’re going to go do _things_ and I’m not letting you come home until you’re done being a waste of space!”

Later, much much later, he will be the most surprised of anyone that he just shrugged and let himself be dragged off in the wake of the tidal wave that was Nepeta Leijon on a mission.

He had expected her to take him on a whirlwind tour of guilt and anger, to go seen all the things he had apparently ruined. He was ready for that. So when she instead hauled him bodily into a walk in clinic and all but threw him at a doctor, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

They left as the sun began disappearing, and he thought that was the end of it. But she dredged him to the pharmacy with his new slip of paper in hand, and she watched him with narrow eyes as the woman behind the counter counted pills.

Then it was off to her apartment block for extremely sparkly cartoons and pasta and suspicious looks from her older sister and pastor mother.

He ended up asleep on their couch, and walked himself home in the morning. He expected that to be the end of it.

But, she kept coming back, again and again and again. Sometimes she brought her sweaty best friend. Sometimes she brought other familiar faces, Karkat got _tall_ somehow, and unfamiliar ones, like the Crocker-cousin-twice-removed with the enormous glasses and the dog-eared hoodie. Every other week, she push-pulled him into the same clinic, where the woman at check-ins recognized him by sight.

It went on for _months_.

One day she said something absurdly dumb- which she did often enough, because she was fast but she wasn’t exactly well read- and he laughed.

And she looked so _angry_ , and he laughed more, and more. Some kind of hysterical fit that refused to stop, and eventually she punched him in the shoulder- freakishly strong for such a tiny girl- and laughed too, until they were a pile of sore, breathless, giggling idiots.

“You’re the meanest, rudest purrson _efur_ , Sollux Catpurr! I ought to skin you like a bunny!” I twas not a particularly angry declaration. “Come with me to the Purrom, be my mean old date so Equitty can get a purrple bow tie instead! He thinks I don’t know that he wants to take a real date, but I _doooo_! You have to be my shiny new furiend date!”

He didn’t know what, exactly, he was doing when he said yes.

Prom was a fucking involvement. He had to get a suit and everything, and it should have exhausted him, like everything else had for so goddamn long. But it didn’t, not really.

It was weird, having to fill out the paperwork to get his ticket, because he wasn’t a student at their school anymore. But Nepeta, he had learned over trial by fire, was not even a force to be reckoned with. There was no reckoning possible when it came to her, and somehow he ended up standing on a step ladder in the Maryam house, with Kanaya looking at him like he wasn’t quite real, and her sister getting increasingly frustrated with his “unreasonable” demands for “colors that we cannot in good conscience allow in the same ensemble.”

It’s almost _fun_.

On the day of, Nepeta skipped school entirely, her phone buzzing constantly with texts of varying degrees of disapproval from Equius, as she forced Sollux out to the park to have “purrsonal discussions and lay in the sun, which makes efurrything better.”

“I did something you’re not gonna like, Catpurr.” She began, once they were settled beneath an scraggly looking excuse for a crabapple tree, with only barely enough leaves to make a pleasant dapple in the spring sunlight. “You’re gonna get real angry, but I think you know by now that won’t stop me!”

She jabbed his shoulder with an emphatic finger, and he found himself grinning.

“You’re already dragging me into a mathive crowd of douchebagth in thuitth, how much worthe can it get?”

She shrugged lightly, flopping backwards to stare that the leaves, short, dark hair curling up in a mess of dirt and twigs that he knew meant Meulin would give her the “disappointed in your lack of personal pride” look until Nepeta let her get out the straightener.

“I put your name in fur purrom king, and then I put Aradia in fur purrom queen, and then me and Fefurry and Equitty and Jade made sure efurryone knows to vote fur you under penalty of death!”

She said it with a casual, careless intensity, punching at the sky like she was planning on getting an ice cream cake for his birthday: thoughtlessly musing.

It was a sharp counter point to the cold knot in his stomach as he bolted to his feet.

But he didn’t get very far, of course, given Nepeta’s continuing disregard for the use of physical force and her freakish reflexes.

She was up and tackling him before he even knew where he was trying to go, and made alarmingly quick work of rolling him over and pinning his arms behind his back so he couldn’t even fight back properly.

“Now you listen to me, mewster!” She leaned hard on her elbow, dragging it into his ribs much like her finger into his shoulder only a minute ago. “When Aradia died you died too, and you didn’t even get sad, you just shut off and it was pawful and horrible and this is gonna fix it. Not all of it, beclaws contrary to popurrlar belief, I’m not stupid, but you have your pills and your doctor fur all of that other stuff and this is your big chance to go up there in furont of efurryone and tell them all about how great she was, and how much you loved her and how it almost killed you _twice_ , and this is gonna be her big memorial! If you don’t want to do it, you can stay home and eat popcorn and cry, and I’ll waste my pretty senior purrom dress on watching you be a dummy.

“But you _should_ come, Pawlux.” She only called him that when it was serious. Which was stupid and counterproductive, and very much like her. “When Karkitty and Fefurry tried to set it up for you last time, they did it _wrong_ and they should have told you first so you would _know_ , and I should have made them. But I didn’t. And I’m sorry, but you should still come, and you should still tell efurryone about her fur real so they don’t furget her like you won’t.”

She didn’t get off of his back for the longest time. Not until the rock pushing into his hip- sharp and cold and definitely not a dangly skirt chain with too many stupid charms badly sewn onto a waistband- started to go from dull awareness to legitimate pain.

“Okay, Catpurr, I’m gonna go home and get all fancied up. I’ll see you tonight, when you decide what you wanna do.”

He wanted, of course, to go home and crawl into bed and not move again. He wanted to be a rock, like last summer, when he was tired and empty and didn’t have to feel sad, or jealous, or powerless, or angry. When he didn’t have to feel anything but exhausted.

Instead, he pulled on his ridiculous tuxedo, black down the left side and white down the right, with a red and blue checked mess of a shirt that made Kanaya shudder when she saw it, but made him feel better anyway.

One good thing had come out of spending a year as a slowly recovering hermit, just the one. Hermits don’t spend a lot of money. He had enough, tucked away here and there in the backs of drawers and the bottoms of half forgotten savings accounts, to call in to the florist shop Jade was always waxing poetic about, and pay a ridiculous premium for a rush order. At least it wasn’t roses and orchids, so it was still in stock.

Sollux Captor, after all, did nothing by halves and had plenty of experience with Google.

When they called him up on the makeshift stage in the middle of the cheap, tacky ballroom, it didn't even occur to him to wonder how Nepeta got a dead girl and a drop out elected King and Queen- she was a force of fucking nature after all.

And the sight of delicate white bell flowers on a darkly contrasting bed of sharp scented bay leaves tied with the sort of ridiculously sparkly ribbons she loves around her misleadingly tiny wrist is enough to even keep his voice steady.


End file.
